I started Forge, which is an open-source, free project that lets you play Magic: The Gathering against the computer. Currently other people are updating Forge and there will be no more posts to this blog.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Dark Ascension is Coming

I thought about posting a new version of Forge today but the most recently released version on the forums does not download the new Dark Ascension card pictures, and I know that everybody loves to use and abuse new cards. Hopefully a new version of Forge will be posted to the forums on March 2nd but that is only a tentative date and it may change. The next version will have at least 149 cards from Dark Ascension.

The Forge team is very happy to announce that Forge now supports more than 10,000 cards, which is a major milestone. Here is the announcement that they posted on the forum. (This relates to the 02-03 version which does not download the Dark Ascension card pictures.)

{begin quote}

The Forge team is very proud to announce that more than 10,000 cards are now available for play! This is an impressive amount, particularly considering that as of October 2011, the official game has produced 12,246 unique cards.

Rares, the creator of Forge, generously shared his work as an open source project about five years ago. Since then, dozens of people have contributed their talents to evolve the codebase to the point it's reached today: a game engine that can successfully juggle 10^5 10^4 unique cards, available for free.

The honor of writing the 10,000th card has gone to an unnamed hero, which is suitable since it's these brave code warriors that make the game what it is. A well-deserved thanks to anyone who has volunteered their time to script, test, maintain, report, code, suggest, debug, design, or in any way contribute to this project.

A special thanks in particular to the CCGH web site and its administrators for providing us with the Forge forum, and to the unsung team of people who quietly maintain the servers which assist this project in one fashion or another.

With this in mind, we move onward and upward. Enjoy your next game of Forge!

{end quote}

I sarcastically asked, “What will the developers do once Forge supports every card in existence?” and someone replied, “Start debugging”. That was a joke but it was very funny. Although I know Forge can be buggy, it is also awesome. (I have heard much the same thing about Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, awesome but buggy.)

Dark Ascension
I presume most people know about magiccards.info but I will mention it anyways. Magiccards.info is similar to Gatherer but has very, high-quality scans of Magic cards. You can view a visual spoiler for Dark Ascension at magicards.info here.

If you want to download all of the card pictures and peruse them offline, link (26 MB).

Deck Forum
Forge has a separate forum just for decks and you can upload and download a ton of new/different decks. The “New Quest Deck” post allows people to post decks and then adds them to the list of opponents for Forge’s quest mode. You can also download a different set of files for sealed and draft, which is called a “cube”. Another person posted the top 8 decks from the Grand Prix Lincoln 2012 as well as 256 decks from “Building on a Budget” which is posted weekly on dailymtg.com.

That is about it. Have a grape (great) week :)

-mtgrares

p.s.
I have started to get into miniature wargaming, which is pretty cool. I love making strategic decisions and talk about a genre that really needs a good videogame. Awhile ago I played a ton of Advance Wars for Gameboy Advance. While it isn't really a “wargame”, it is still an excellent game.